The electronics industry requires manufacturers to offer small-sized consumer products. To meet this demand, the computing platforms of these products must be highly integrated, which requires greater functionality to be designed into the power supply and control chips.
Because of their complexity, different segments of the computing platforms require different voltage rail and current levels. These different levels have been provided using discrete voltage regulators which are specifically fixed in terms of their performance, e.g., number of rails, rail voltages, maximum rail current as well as other factors. The requirement of having to produce different voltage regulators, or regulator arrays, for each kind of electronic product has proven inefficient and expensive to say the least.